The World Transformed: Swedenborg and the Last Judgment

Judgment Day, the Apocalypse, the end of the world? The contributors to The World Transformed do not offer complete information of this awesome event, nor do they accept the popular notion that the world will end in the next year or two. Instead, they hold the refreshingly unusual position that the “end of the world” and “judgment day” occurred a little over 250 years ago. Not an earthly cataclysm, this spiritual judgment was like a drop of water falling into a pond, and we have been living through the rippling consequences of those momentous spiritual events ever since. Those events were witnessed, recorded, and published by the scientist, philosopher, and theologian Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772). Drawing upon works such as his The Last Judgment (1758) and Apocalypse Revealed (1766), the authors herein offer a new interpretation of the spiritual state of America, Europe, Africa, the Middle-East and China. Essays consider the profound changes in the lives of children, women, and people of color since 1757. Scholars from Bryn Athyn College of the New Church and elsewhere reflect upon the developments in mathematics, natural science, and philosophy from the distinctly different conceptual framework provided by the idea that the major turning-point in modern human civilization is not in the future, but in the relatively recent past. The themes that unite the chapters of the book are the same as the powerful forces that vie with one another for supremacy in the human race and in each individual: freedom and slavery; understanding and ignorance; altruism and egoism; spirituality and materialism; hope and despair. Here is news: in the middle of the eighteenth century, at the height of the Enlightenment, the Last Judgment took place, old falsities and corruption were unmasked, and a new spiritual dynamism was born. How did this—how does this—transform the world? Come and see.